[Books & Culture, March/April 2008]
On the road, shuttling between airports and motels, I sent my daughter an email: “I’m on my way to Branson, Missouri. They say it’s like Las Vegas, but for Christians over fifty.” She wrote back, “I can’t even begin to imagine what that means.”
I could; I imagined it would be laughable and hokey. (You could point out that I am a Christian over fifty and should get off my high horse, but I would only blink at you.) This little town of 6,000
[ChristianityTodayMovies.com; February 29, 2008]
[Cast: Jessica Lange (Arvilla), Kathy Bates (Margene), Joan Allen (Carol), Tom Skerritt (Emmett), Christine Baranaski (Francine)]
Oh boy, a movie about a 1966 Bonneville convertible! That’s the car my sisters and I learned to drive on. Ours was silver with a black interior, purchased brand-new off the showroom floor with every possible extra. We called it the Batmobile. It’s in retirement at Louisa’s place now, but I like to think of it as resting up.
I went to see the cinematic “Bonneville” filled with hopeful nostalgia, but, I regret to say, it’s a really crummy movie. Though the car appears in the film, it’s mere eye candy for a story about three middle-aged women (“middle,” that is, if you know lots of 120-year-olds). They’re using the spiffy vehicle to make a road trip from Pocatello, Idaho to Santa Barbara, California. Though road-trip movies have been overdone, it could still have been enjoyable, especially as a comedy retaining down-to-earth, wisecracking Kathy Bates. But “Bonneville” is also burdened with a *serious* plot element, one that feels contrived and manipulative.
[First Things; February 5, 2008]
Even if you go around with one or several fingers stuffed into each ear, you will not be able to exclude the words “Hannah Montana” from your field of consciousness. No American citizen is permitted to be unfamiliar with the words “Hannah Montana.” What you are permitted is to be uncertain of what the words mean. Unless you made the decision to have a seven-year-old granddaughter about now, without taking sufficient forethought for the consequences.
I’ve resisted learning about the Hannah Montana industry until recently, despite the acquisition of my own seven-year-old granddaughter, herself a Hannah.
[Ancient Faith Radio; January 30, 2008]
There was a time, back in May of 2006, when The da Vinci Code movie was just about to come out, and then did come out and cause a lot of consternation among Christians of every description, Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox—controversy about this whole phenomenon, the terrifically popular pop novel, The Da Vinci Code, and the high profile Hollywood movie that was made of that book. And a lot of worry about how can we respond to something that seems to be grasping the imagination of so many people, when you can hardly engage it; the basic ideas are so preposterous that it doesn’t have any historic grounding, you don’t know how to grapple with it.
I love movies like this. But, sad to say, I didn’t love this movie. I hoped I would, but one clunker after another kept accumulating—a hackneyed character here, a stupid line of dialogue there—until it was sounding like a sneaker in a dryer.
That’s too bad, because this format has been the foundation of some terrific, thought-provoking films. You take a sizeable number of characters, most of whom have never met, and set their stories in motion. As the multiple plots unfold, each character is being drawn closer to the center, where a resolution awaits that, in the best of these films, can be simultaneously unexpected and inevitable. Let’s coin a term and call them “drawstring” movies, a subset of the genre known as “ensemble” films.
[Ancient Faith Radio; January 23, 2008]
I’m recording this on January 22nd, 2008, the 35th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion all through America—through all 50 states, through all nine months of pregnancy.People question that sometimes, because the Roe decision says that abortion should be available to a woman under any circumstances, until the point of viability.It said that, after that, states can begin to have some laws protecting the unborn child, after viability.But there’s a companion decision to Roe v. Wade, called Doe v. Bolton.It came down the same day, and it governs how that proposed post-viability period can be legislated in the states.It says that states may do nothing to restrict a woman’s access to abortion if she wants the abortion for some aspect of her health.Well, the result is that you can have a legal abortion at almost any point in pregnancy if you are willing to travel for it.There are specialists who go into these post-viability late-term abortions, that’s what they specialize in offering.
[Ancient Faith Radio; January 16, 2008]
This is another one of those times when I’m someplace and kind of embarrassed to say where I am. I’m in the parking lot of an all-you-an-eat buffet restaurant; this one’s a Golden Corral. I’m about to go in and have some dinner. And this is one of my secret techniques at being a writer, that when I have a lot of stuff I need to go through, a lot of paper, like when I’ve gotten the manuscript of a book back from the editor and I need to look at every page and see what all the suggestions and changes are, this is my plan: I go to an all-you-can-eat place and I put the big stack of paper on the table and I’ll get salad and then I’ll read for a half hour. And then I’ll get some vegetables and then read for another half hour. And just stretch it out and make it a little more cheerful than it might otherwise be.
[Ancient Faith Radio; January 9, 2008]
Frederica: Here we are, still hurtling along.This will air a week later, but I just broke there so that we could continue this fascinating conversation we’re having about ancient Rome, so that we could make it into two podcasts instead of one.I am in a car being driven with extreme competence and safety by my prayer partner Colleen Oren, who is the choir director at Holy Cross Church.Also in the front seat is Ina O’Dell, Shamassey Ina, wife of Deacon Mark.And we have our monthly breakfast where we get together and share our prayer requests, and our husbands think we get together to talk about them, but that just shows their suspicious minds.[Laughter] And today we’re going way out in the country to sort of a country family restaurant for breakfast, and I’ve been talking to Ina about what she saw in Rome about ancient Orthodox Christianity in Rome, and the very, very early churches that she saw.You have so much to say.How long were you there, like a week?
[Ancient Faith Radio; June 2, 2008]
Frederica: The wheels are turning on the pavement and we’re hurtling north-westward.[Laughter] I’m making this sound like a dramatic story here.We’re on I-795, hitting the pavement, as Colleen Oren, choir director at Holy Cross Church, intrepidly, courageously, and bravely drives her car forward, westward, into the cold.It’s sort of a chilly morning today.Colleen is one of my prayer partners, and so is Ina O’Dell who is sitting next to her in the front seat. Shamassey Ina, the wife of our deacon, Mark O’Dell.And I thought, now that we’re all trapped together in this one car for half an hour to get out there to the restaurant—we’re going out to a restaurant, sort of a country restaurant, and a fair trade store that’s nearby.Now that we’re on this expedition, I wanted to corral Ina and have her tell me about something.Ina and Mark went to Rome - it was something related to his work, wasn’t it? What was it that he was going for?
[Ancient Faith Radio; December 26, 2007]
Recently I was interviewed for a TV program about the star, the star of Bethlehem, and some of the things that I found out as I was researching it, were pretty interesting to me. Some things about the star, other things about the wise men, or the magi. And here’s the first one: the Bible doesn’t say there were three of them. It just says ‘Wise men from the east.’ It doesn’t say how many. Perhaps there were three. There were three gifts, the gold, frankincense and myrrh, so perhaps that’s where the idea came from, that there were three of them.
